The uses of the past
I have been thinking about public history and the uses of the past a bit lately, and reading Craig Clunas’ Superfluous Things: Material Culture and Social...
Author: Alan Baumler
For the want of a Monsoon
According to Yahoo Asia Nature will be publishing an article tomorrow that claims that climate change was the cause of the fall of the Tang dynasty. A team of G...
Naughty or Nice?
As it is time to think about the good or bad behavior of children, I have been wondering why so many Chinese sage-kings had rotten kids. Lewis points out that o...
Chairman Mao’s teacher
A nice article in Modern China on Mao’s teacher Yang Changji. The article draws on Yeh Wen-Hsin’s work on the provincial background of many of the second group ...
Keeping Halal in the Ming dynasty
As regular readers know, I am interested in the question of how people are defined as Chinese. One nice bit of data comes from Hans Kuhner. He is looking at a p...
Cinderella, dressed in yellow, went to Scotland and kissed a fellow
Via Cliopatria, a website with Scottish broadsides from 1810-1830. One is obviously satirical, announcing the arrival of a Chinese doctor Dr. Puff Stuff Sham Qu...
Ancient Chinese sex advice
One scholar who has had a lot of influence on my teaching on Early China is Mark Edward Lewis. I sometimes assign Sanctioned Violence in Early China, and if I h...
No need for Clever Speech
It is recorded in the Han chronicles that when Emperor Wen visited his pleasure park he went to the area called Tiger Garden. There he questioned the official i...
Military history MIA? WIA? KIA?
There has been a good deal of discussion on Cliopatria and elsewhere on the topic of military history. This discussion was sparked off by a piece in the Nationa...
Double Ten
Coming soon is Double Ten, the anniversary of the Oct. 10, 1911 Wuhan revolt that led to the collapse of the Qing dynasty and the foundation of the Republic of ...
Electrons, the ultimate export
Preview of a documentary on gold-mining in China http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ho5Yxe6UVv4 I hope my son never sees this post, which suggests that you really c...
Frederic Wakeman, 1937-2006
Obituary here We used his Fall of Imperial China as a text when I was an undergrad, and The Great Enterprise was one of the first things I read in grad school. ...